SERIES OF AVOIDABLE
HOSPITALIZATIONS AND
STRENGTHENING PRIMARY HEALTH
CARE
Primary Care Effectiveness and the Extent of
Avoidable Hospitalizations in Latin America and
the Caribbean

Frederico C. Guanais
Ronald G贸mez-Su谩rez
Leonardo Pinz贸n

Inter-American Development Bank
2012

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SERIES OF AVOIDABLE HOSPITALIZATIONS AND
STRENGTHENING PRIMARY HEALTH CARE

Primary Care Effectiveness and the Extent of Avoidable Hospitalizations in Latin America
and the Caribbean

Inter-American Development Bank
Social Protection and Health Division

Frederico C. Guanais, PhD.
Ronald G贸mez-Su谩rez, MSc
Leonardo Pinz贸n

December, 2012

1

Abstract
This study combines detailed datasets on 39.1 million hospital discharges in six
countries in Latin America and the Caribbean with summary statistics for the
remaining countries in the region in order to estimate the number and economic
effect of avoidable hospitalizations for ambulatory care sensitive conditions in the
region. We estimated the number of avoidable hospitalizations to be in a range
between 8.1 and 10 million, with both visible costs of attention and hidden costs
of opportunity representing as high as 2.5% of the reported total health
expenditure in 2009. Among countries with low coverage and high poverty levels,
these costs assume an even higher value in terms of wasted labor usage and
resources spent. It briefly examines some policy implications of using data on
hospitalizations for ambulatory care sensitive conditions as a policy instrument
for measuring the health system performance.
JEL Classification: I, I1, I11, I12, I18
Key Words: Developing Countries, Primary Care, Avoidable hospitalizations,
Prevention and Control, Chronic Diseases, Latin America and the Caribbean.

2

1. Introduction
The renewed interest of LAC countries around the need to strengthen primary health care to
address the non-communicable diseases (NCD’s) epidemic has strengthened the interest in an
indicator that correlates with access, quality and use of primary health care services. Ambulatory
care sensitive conditions (ACSC) – those conditions that could theoretically be managed at
primary-care level – have been used in studies in a growing number of countries.1
Most of these studies correlate quality and access of primary care with hospitalizations
for ACSC, which are commonly referred to as avoidable hospitalizations. However, no studies
have presented a broader cross-country perspective on the magnitude of avoidable
hospitalizations or the costs associated with them.
This paper relies on a series of national reports to estimate the number and cost of
avoidable hospitalizations for ACSC in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and it briefly
examines some policy implications of using this indicator as a public policy instrument for
measuring health system performance. Misdirected care describes the waste generated by
unnecessary procedures and emphasis on curative care, instead of preventive care.

2. Primary health care in a context of epidemiological transition in LAC
Most countries in LAC are experiencing a rapid demographic and epidemiological transition
leading to a growing prevalence of NCDs, notably diabetes, cardiovascular conditions and
cancer. This situation can be explained in part by the adverse effects of urbanization and
development, leading to growing exposure to risk factors such as unhealthy diets, reduced
physical activity, the use of tobacco and alcohol, and obesity. 2 Inadequate access to high quality
preventive health care services is another important contributing factor to the growing burden of
chronic disease.

Chronic diseases are already the main cause of death and disease in LAC, accounting for
68 percent of all deaths and 60% of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). 3 Cardiovascular
diseases alone are responsible for 35 percent of all deaths in the region, with cancer following as
the second cause of death in the Americas, killing approximately 1.15 million people in 2005.4
Also, it also has been documented that chronic diseases affect all population groups,
though their impact is much larger on the poorest, as they suffer from access restrictions, lower
use, greater prevalence of risk factors and limited access to detection and treatment services.5
It is in this context that the role of primary health care in disease prevention should be
highlighted. Some characteristics that are inherent to primary health care have a greater potential
to reduce disease and, consequently, the number of hospitalizations. Wider coverage and access
to primary health care has been linked to better health results as long as prevention, care, cure
and rehabilitation actions are guaranteed. Several studies suggest that an increase in preventive
practices may lead to a reduction in the number of hospitalizations.6
Some LAC countries have adopted family-oriented health services, such as Brazil’s
flagship Family Health Program, as a way to increase access and coverage. Besides ensuring the
provision of services, many of these programs seek to guarantee health care continuity.
Guaranteeing health service access and continuity — understood as a primary-care attribute —
has had a positive impact on the state of health and has translated into declining hospitalization
rates.7 Family-centered and community-oriented primary health care has brought positive overall
results while care continuity has helped to reduce hospitalization rates for chronic diseases
within the subset of ACSC.8
Coordination between the different levels of health care is another factor that seems to be
associated with lower hospitalization rates. Because primary health care should be the first point
of contact with the health system, primary care health providers are expected to encounter
different types of pathologies that must be treated at different levels of health care.

3. Primary Care and Ambulatory Care Sensitive Conditions
To measure the effectiveness of primary care, it is necessary to clarify the way primary care can
help to improve overall health results and hence reduce inpatient hospital usage. Several
mechanisms have been considered: first, those related to simple access to care (coverage of
hospitals, density of physicians, geographical barriers, etc); second, the scope of provided care,
meaning its coordination with the other levels of attention and the breadth of such attention; and
finally, the mechanism must to be coherent with the epidemiological profile of the population, its
distribution and its socioeconomic and cultural characteristics.9 This view has been adopted by
the World Health Organization, which recommends the implementation of strong schemes of
first level care to meet health needs.10
The methodology of hospitalizations for ACSC assumes that timely and effective primary
care may reduce the frequency of hospital admissions for several diseases or even eliminate such
admissions. It is possible to track the overall effectiveness of primary attention provided by a
specific country or geographical region by measuring the impact of these conditions related to
the total admissions. This method has been used to monitor the performance of health systems in
the United States and in some European countries and is based on a wide and growing body of
literature.11 For Latin American countries, however, and for developing countries in general, this
thesis has been insufficiently tested.12
A condition may be identified as sensitive to primary care in several ways. 13 For some
diseases, early intervention precludes onset and eventual hospitalization; such is the case of
vaccine-preventable diseases (hepatitis B, measles). A second group includes mostly acute
conditions that respond to timely out-patient treatment and early diagnosis, such as
gastroenteritis and dehydration. Lastly, for some acute and chronic conditions (diabetes,
congestive heart failure, malnutrition) the occurrence and severity of hospitalizations, as well as
their derived complications, may be decreased by applying effective schemes of prevention and
monitoring.

The use of a previously compiled list of ACSCs is advisable when a comprehensive analysis
of avoidable hospitalizations is performed, and particularly when several countries are
compared.14 The process of compiling the list, however, poses several challenges, as its validity
changes depending on the specific country to which it is applied. The last available study of the
Latin American region was performed in 2009 for Brazil and it has been used as the frame of
reference for the analysis.15
Hospital discharges at national or regional levels are the preferred source for measuring the
level of ACS hospitalizations. However, the availability of data is limited and most cases are
complicated by issues related to quality and coverage. In countries with public health systems,
universal coverage and a centralized budget, relevant databases are more accessible. Collection
and standardization are far more complex in countries with private insurance-based mixed
systems.

4. Study Data and Method

This study relies on detailed data on hospital discharges in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica,
Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay, combined with summary data published by international
organizations. The detailed data were provided by the respective ministries of health and sanitary
authorities for national studies commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank. The
available datasets contain, at a minimum, individual information on age, sex, geographical origin
and diagnosis (following the ICD-10 third revision), although the variables change according to
country.
The scope and time range of the information varies. For Argentina, the database was
provided by the Ministry of Health for all events that required hospitalization in the public
network. In Colombia the source was the National Individual Registry of Care (RIPS), which
compiles the discharges reported by every hospital or center duly obligated to do so. In Costa
Rica the data comes from the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social, the publicly managed and
universal social security insurer. In Ecuador the source was the Yearbook of Hospital
14
15

Weissman et al (1992);
Alfradique et al (2009);

6

Discharges, published by the National Institution of Statistics, with national coverage. Data of
Mexico comes from the public social security insurer (IMSS), that represents more than half of
the population. Finally, for Paraguay the Ministry of Health made available the database of
hospital discharges from 2001 to 2008, which covers the population without health coverage.
The construction of the indicator of avoidable hospitalization for ACSC was based on a list
that was adapted for the Brazilian case by a group of experts. 16 In most cases, an additional
revision of the list was performed in order to match the codes with those registered in the
databases. The original Brazilian study identified 20 groups of conditions mostly ICD-10 codes.
For simplicity, we used a 3-digit coding of the previously identified conditions, which include
the overall conditions referred in the Brazilian case. Twelve of those groups applied to the entire
population, while eight applied for subsets of ages (e.g. only children).
Estimation for the remaining LAC countries for which hospital data was not available
required a series of steps, briefly described here. We used a two-step approach in which
avoidable hospitalizations were estimated on the basis of total hospital usage. This indicator
(originally expressed as discharge rates per 100.000 inhabitants) is not available for most
countries, so it had to be imputed from socioeconomic and health-related data of OECD
countries, where the actual usage is reported.
We started by aggregating the total hospital discharges for Latin American countries, as the
indicator of ACS is computed using total inpatient usage. An imputation was performed for
countries that do not disclose this information, replicating the relationship seen in 34 OECDmember countries between hospital discharges rates (a percentage of hospitalizations over
population) and a set of relevant variables. The sources for this segment are the official databases
of the World Health Organization, OECD and the World Bank. With this information a panel
dataset was constructed from 2001 to 2009, using the estimators of a random-effects regression
to fit the missing values17. The imputation model follows the form

16

Ibid
The random effects model was chosen based on the outcomes of two tests: First a Hausmann test that rejected the hypothesis of no correlation
between the unique errors Îąi and the regressors xit. The second test applied was a Breusch-Pagan Lagrange Multiplier (LM), which tracks
significant differences across individuals (countries in this case). The null hypothesis of equality between countries (equal variances of residuals)
is rejected, so an OLS regression is not applicable. Green (2003)
17

7

where Uit is the imputed usage, expressed as the percentage of discharges over the population by
year and country, Xit is a set of relevant variables (log of per capita income, life expectancy in
years, % population older than 65 years and hospital beds per 1.000 inhabitants), Îąi is the unique
error term, variable over time but constant over countries, and Îľit the so-called within-error.
Exhibit 1 shows the outcomes of both fixed and random effects.
Exhibit 1. Coefficients imputation model for discharges; fixed and random effects
Variable

To impute the rate of avoidable hospitalizations, we used parameters taken from the six
countries where data is available, adjusting the incidence by specific age groups, to generate an
age-standardized rate. An interval of confidence was estimated, designed to account for
idiosyncratic factors and non-observable factors. This exercise does not aim to produce a point
estimation but rather an interval where the actual number may be placed with reasonable
likelihood.
An event of avoidable hospitalization mainly brings about two costs: the visible costs of
attention and the hidden costs of opportunity.18 For the valuation of hospitalization costs we took
as benchmark the reported unitary costs of Brazilian public care in 2009 (IBGE), adjusting by
purchasing power parity for every country included in the group of study, converting to the
average exchange rate in US dollars of that year. The opportunity cost, on the other hand, is
defined as the value of the output ceased to produce. It is assumed that the average length of
hospitalization (in days) is a proxy of the number of the productive lost days by the health event.
The population estimated in the ACS section was standardized according with the demographic
breakdown reported in the labor statistics for every country, valuing the lost day as the GDP per
capita computed for working days in a year. The data sources of health expenditures, labor
18

Weissman et al (1992)

8

participation, employment and average exchange rates are The World Bank and The World
Health Organization.

5. Results: Trends in Avoidable Hospitalizations
A total of 39.1 million hospital discharges were available for examination, and 14.3 percent of
those matched the label of Ambulatory Care Sensitive Conditions.19 The average rate for the
entire period ranges between 10.8 percent (for Costa Rica) and 21.6 percent (for Colombia).
Exhibit 1 shows the main indicators derived from the discharges data available.

19

In the sample Mexico has 21 million of discharges, which represents 53% of the total sample. In order to avoid a bias towards
the Mexican case, the findings are presented by country and not aggregated.

The breakdown by groups reflects the epidemiologic profile of each country, as well as
the main features of the population covered by the hospitals. The incidence in some countries
may be greater because of their younger and relatively more vulnerable populations, reflecting
not only demographic traits but also the socioeconomic profile of the population covered by the
10

system. It is expected that countries with higher economic development and older population
have a greater incidence of chronic diseases, while countries with lower income may still reflect
a sizeable impact of communicable diseases. However, the opposite does not always hold true,
because a low proportion of AH does not necessarily imply that the preventive services are
working properly. It may be caused by low access in both primary care and hospital settings20.
When it comes to ACS hospitalizations, the available data agrees with some of the former
premises. The countries with the highest impact of avoidable hospitalizations by chronic diseases
are Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina and Colombia, while Ecuador and Paraguay (with lower
income) show a larger effect of preventable conditions. Some other outcomes are less obvious:
the most important set of conditions in Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay are those related to
infectious gastroenteritis, with 33, 27 and 22 percent of all ACS reported cases respectively. For
Colombia and Costa Rica, the group with the highest percentage (averaging 15 percent) is â&#x20AC;&#x153;lower
airways diseases,â&#x20AC;? which comprises diagnoses such as bronchitis and emphysema. Mexico shows
a far larger effect of diabetes (16 percent) than the other countries (average of 5 percent).
Overall, conditions such as kidney and urinary infections and skin infections have shown an
upward trend, displacing vaccine-preventable and avoidable conditions.
From the data at hand it cannot be determined that the impact of ACS has increased in the
region, but the observed trends of chronic disease prevalence may point in that direction.21 We
had available time-series data from Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay, showing the
trend of ACS hospitalizations from 2001 to 200822. A sustained increase in the indicator of ACS
hospitalizations was observed in Paraguay, which in 2008 reached a peak of 21.5 percent, up
from 17 percent reported in 2002. Both Ecuador and Mexico showed a rather stable rate of the
indicator (averaging 17% and 13% respectively), whereas Costa Rica actually shows a decrease
in the rate of hospitalizations during the period (see exhibit 3).

6. Projections for LAC
At a 95 percent confidence level, a range between 8 and 10 million avoidable
hospitalizations for the region of Latin America and the Caribbean was estimated for 2009, with
a mean of 9.1 million hospitalizations. This corresponds to a range between 16.8 and 21 percent
of total discharges, and a mean of 19 percent. The indicator mimics the trends found in the
sample of countries with actual data, and does not include information at a national-regional
level (see section 3). The nominal amount of hospitalizations is greatly affected by the outcome
of Brazil, given its share of population within the region, where avoidable hospitalizations still
remains at high levels, in spite of a recent decline associated with expansion of primary care.23
As previously mentioned, the ACS hospitalizations cause 2 types of cost: direct and indirect
(section 3). We estimated the sum of these two components to represent as high as 2.4% of the
public expenditure health reported for that year 24, and 1.5% of the total health expenditure (3.7
billion dollars in 2009). Among countries with low coverage and high poverty levels, where
23
24

Alfradique et al (2009); Macinko et al (2010)
WHO

12

public health expenditure is typically low, these costs assume an even higher value in terms of
wasted labor usage and resources spent. The estimated results of avoidable hospitalizations and
costs associated with them are presented in exhibit 3.
Exhibit 4. Estimated proportion of ACSC and costs.
% ACS/Total
discharges
(average interval)

Source: The World Bank. Countries in italics have an observed rate of ACS

The cost estimation takes into account general availability of medical care, percentage of
active and working population, per capita production values, purchasing power parity rates
13

among other variables. Most of the costs attributable to ACS hospitalizations come from the
value of care itself (direct cost), rather than the loss of working days. However, this indirect cost
increases as per capita income and employment rates grew larger.

7. Discussion
This study is a first attempt to estimate the proportion of avoidable hospitalizations for
ambulatory care-sensitive conditions out of the total number of hospitalizations, as well as their
cost to Latin America and the Caribbean. An average of 9.6 million hospitalizations each year
can be categorized as preventable, or sensitive to ambulatory care that is timely, adequate, and
accessible. This corresponds to an annual cost equivalent to 2.4% of total public health
expenditure. This estimate has very important policy implications, suggesting that additional
funds invested for strengthening integrated primary health care services will likely pay
themselves off by reducing costs of treatment for avoidable hospitalizations, increasing
efficiency of the labor force, and improving overall population health status.
An analysis between the association between resources invested in the expansion of primary
health care and resources saved with the decrease of avoidable hospitalizations is beyond the
scope of the current study. Therefore, in terms of both research agenda and practical policy
applications, a logical next step is the identification of hypotheses and alternative interventions
that may reduce avoidable hospitalizations.
One of the relevant public policy questions is whether it is possible to identify factors in
primary health care that play a role in avoiding hospitalizations for the selected ACSC
conditions. Playing a role means applying one or more of the following interventions: primary
prevention; early diagnoses (and treatment) of the condition or its precursor; good ongoing
control and management.
The evolution of rates as a result of avoidable illnesses could help to advance the decisionmaking process regarding the configuration of primary-care networks and to indirectly monitor
the health care effectiveness. High rates of hospitalization for certain conditions may indicate
problems of access to primary health care and to qualified practitioners and inputs in difficult-toaccess areas.
14

Moreover, the evolution of hospitalizations for certain conditions may provide evidence on
the quality of health care protocols and the management of clinical practices as additional key
elements of primary care. Consequently, these analyses may prove remarkably useful for
establishing relevant research and public policy agendas aimed at improving the performance of
health care systems in the region.

this study combines detailed datasets on 39.1 million hospital discharges in six countries in latin america and the caribbean with summary statistics for the remaining countries in the region in order to estimate the number and economic effect of avoidable hospitalizations for ambulatory care sensitive conditions in the region. we estimated the number of avoidable hospitalizations to be in a range between 8.1 and 10 million, with both visible costs of attention and hidden costs of opportunity representing as high as 2.5% of the reported total health expenditure in 2009. among countries with low coverage and high poverty levels, these costs assume an even higher value in terms of wasted labor usage and resources spent. it briefly examines some policy implications of using data on hospitalizations for ambulatory care sensitive conditions as a policy instrument for measuring the health system performance.